Violet Cherry was honored at the Friends of F.W. Willoughby 53rd Annual Garden Party at Englewood Hospital in September 2006.

“If you’re an advocate, you have to be willing to do something and stand up for yourself,” Cherry once told a reporter. “You can’t just sit up on a basket chair and put your feet up.”

On Monday, the 80-year-old Cherry, best known locally as the former pioneering director of Englewood’s Health Department and later as Democratic municipal party chairwoman, died at Englewood Hospital and Medical Center, where she was being treated for pneumonia.

The tributes that followed have focused, not surprisingly, on her outspokenness, her unwillingness to bend to authority and her dedication to the citizens of Englewood.

“She was passionately progressive, abrasive, strong,” said state Sen. Loretta Weinberg, D-Teaneck, a longtime Cherry supporter. “She could sometimes be annoying, but it was always for common, core beliefs.”

“She was a warrior,” said Dorothy Phelan, Cherry’s friend of four decades. “She was afraid of no one from the time she was a child.”

Cherry was born Violet Daisy Naicker on Nov. 25, 1933, in Durban, South Africa, to a pastry chef father and a social worker/teacher mother who was well known for her work in the city’s Indian community.

Her experiences growing up in the apartheid era, when whites were legally favored over every other racial group, including those of Indian descent such as herself, schooled her early on in the need to fight for the oppressed and excluded — at age 12, she even landed briefly in a jail cell, defiant after her arrest with others protesting apartheid.

At age 16, Cherry began her career in social work and public health in Merebank, a poor Indian neighborhood in Durban, according to her obituary. After three years of training, she married a man chosen by her family, with whom she had one son. They later divorced and Cherry moved to the United States, where she earned masters’ degrees in social work and public health at Columbia University.

In 1974 she was appointed director of Englewood’s Health Department and she and her second husband, David Cherry Sr., moved to the city with their young son.

It was here that Cherry left her mark, transforming a department that up to then had largely confined itself to mundane tasks such as issuing birth certificates and inspecting restaurants into a model for the nation’s cities that provided assistance to pregnant teenagers, ran a well-baby clinic, and oversaw health fairs offering services ranging from free blood screenings to mental-health counseling.

She also created health education programs for restaurant workers, encouraged local ambulance departments to collaborate with one another and partnered with the local hospital to provide services to the community. And she got results: During her tenure, there was a “noted and remarked upon” decrease in the number of teen pregnancies in Englewood, according to Dr. Richard Pierson, a former Board of Health member and chairman of the search committee that hired Cherry.

“The thing that she did magically was to get people from a lot of different subsets of public health to work together,” said Pierson.

In 1992, Cherry became the city’s Democratic municipal chairwoman. She often clashed with county Democratic Party boss Joseph Ferriero, which some say led to her ultimate downfall in the following decade.

Though she had many supporters, she could be divisive and she earned her share of detractors, who accused her of being power-hungry.

“She’s had confrontations with almost everyone of any importance in town over the years,” Norman Davis, a former Englewood councilman, said of Cherry in 2007. She was known for sending “vitriolic” letters, he said, recalling a “five-page diatribe” he said he received after criticizing her.

Cherry was suspended in 2006 from the Health Department after she was accused of engaging in political activities on department time and using health employees for campaigns and personal errands. She resigned in January 2007, and the Health Department dropped its investigation. The U.S. Attorney’s Office also launched its own investigation, subpoenaing Health Department records and taking testimony from workers and board members. That investigation never went anywhere, according to Cherry’s attorney, Charles Sciarra.

“Violet Cherry was an activist who took politics seriously,” said Third Ward Councilman Eugene Skurnick. Ferriero’s cronies, he said, “tried and ultimately failed to fire her and take away her pension on trumped-up charges.”

Cherry is survived by her two sons, Lloyd Padayachi of Cape Town, South Africa, and David Cherry, Jr., of New Orleans, La., as well as two grandchildren.

A wake will be held from 2 to 4 p.m. and 7 to 9 p.m. Monday at the Eternity Funeral Services, 129 Engle St. in Englewood. A funeral service will be held at the funeral home at 10 a.m. Tuesday, followed by interment at Brookside Cemetery in Englewood.